In appreciation of Satyajit Ray's mastery over film posters: Individual characteristics bound by a thread of unity

To celebrate the centenary year of Satyajit Ray, arguably the most remarkable filmmaker born on Indian soil, Firstpost will explore the lesser known aspects of his life in our column Ray-esque.

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It is no exaggeration that late cinema master Satyajit Ray raised his movie posters to the level of art. In fact, he was the only movie auteur in the world who created his posters hands on.

Writing in the world famous Sight & Sound magazine, the production editor of the journal, Isabel Stevens, commented: “Directors such as Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock may have collaborated closely with their film poster designers; other filmmakers may have had a background in graphic design [Abbas Kiarostami] or started their careers illustrating posters [Polish surrealist Walerian Borowczyk]; some have even occasionally designed their own [Akira Kurosawa]. But none have authored such an imaginative collection of posters for their own films as Indian director Satyajit Ray.”

“Father revolutionised the entire concept of movie posters, hoardings, and film publicity. Incidentally, father had experimented with typography and calligraphy for years. It was an inert passion. That surfaced in his posters. Before that, this process was totally conventional in approach. I was too small when Pather Panchali [The Song of the Little Road, 1955] was made and released. But I have heard later that people used to queue up to watch Pather Panchali’s poster. Father knew what would catch the eye. And that is exactly what happened. His posters created a tremendous impact. At that time, our approach was multi-pronged. We had hoardings, posters, kiosk stickers, newspaper ads, and movie house hoardings among a few other publicity materials," says filmmaker Sandip Ray, Satyajit Ray's son.

“There were no computers in those days. One couldn’t blow up or reduce the paper size. So father painstakingly executed the artwork on actual 30 by 40 inches cartridge sheets, which were acquired from GC Laha [the famous, century-old art materials store in Kolkata’s Esplanade area]. Everything was handcrafted by him. It was completely different from how it’s done today. For rural areas, the posters were 20 by 30 inches,” says Sandip. “And we also had flying posters, which were put up on street walls and movie theatre hoardings/kiosk stickers and lobby cards. Flying and cinema house posters were printed on very flimsy paper, and had very little longevity. Sadly, none of the flying posters survive today.”

The posters were initially restored by a top notch restorer from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, who later trained restorers from local institutions to finish this painstaking work. This was during the time when the Society for Preservation of Satyajit Ray’s Films and Archives took up a huge project to restore Satyajit Ray’s massive paperwork heritage. Incidentally, Satyajit Ray would craft around three to four variations of posters for every film. At the moment, the Ray family archive harbours a stock of about 70 to 80 posters in its collection.

Wrapped in acid-free sheets, the original lithograph print posters are now preserved in Godrej storage covers. The original lithographic prints, which comprise the majority of posters in the archive, are in far better condition than the silk screen ones. “Silk screens tend to become brittle over a period of time,” says Sandip.

“Actually, though the artwork of a poster crystallised in time, father would conceive the logo of a film from the stage he selected a story for a movie. This is evident from his [now-famous red, cloth-bound] notebooks where he wrote his screenplays. Flipping through the pages of these scripts, one discovers different designs of the logos as they evolved. All the logos reflected a uniqueness in their own way. Devi [The Goddess, 1960], Teen Kanya [Three Daughters, 1961], Charulata [The Lonely Wife, 1964], Aranyer Din Ratri [Days and Nights in the Forest, 1970],  Paras Pathar [The Philosopher’s Stone, 1958].... It’s very difficult to single out any particular one. All of them displayed an extraordinary touch.

Each logo enjoyed individual characteristics. But there was a very interesting thread of unity running through them,” reminisces Sandip.

In Ganashatru [1989], adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s play Enemy of the People, for instance, Satyajit Ray decided to use the wood block print for the poster logo. Wood block prints are a very early form of art, which was prevalent in the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, but have vanished in the present-day. So Sandip and some of Satyajit Ray’s crew members went hunting for wood blocks in Chitpore [in north-central Kolkata], where wood block print craftsmen had lived and worked for generations.

Thus, all the first-edition prints of Satyajit Ray’s films remain preserved in the Ray family and Ray Society archive. However, all the original artworks, unfortunately, are lost since they were sent by Ray to the printing presses of the day. “I remember many of the initial artworks for posters. Amongst them was an absolutely beautiful drawing in charcoal of Soumitra Chatterjee and Waheeda Rahman for the poster of Abhijan [The Journey, 1962]. The early posters were lithographic artworks. Then the silk-screen technique arrived, which helped produce colours, which father found much brighter. So he made a lithograph artwork on one face of the sheet and a silk-screen image on the other. Again, silk-screen poster colours were not long-lasting and became fragile, and were ruined with the lapse of time. In overseas countries, there is a great deal of interest among collectors to stock original posters. They are also sold at enormous prices at auctions. Sadly, here in India, this degree of interest is virtually absent,” expresses Sandip.

When it came to hoardings, let us say measuring 30 by 10 feet, Satyajit Ray would come up with a 30 by 10 cm artwork, mentioning the measurements it would assume in a 30 by 10 feet hoarding. These were handed over to hoarding  painters, a vanished breed now, who created the final hoarding under the perfectionist’s eye of Satyajit Ray, to avoid distortions from creeping in. “I had accompanied father on several occasions to these painters’ shops, which were usually located in north and central Calcutta. I recall these visits vividly. Now, these hoarding painters are gone. All hoardings are printed nowadays,” Sandip remarks.

What survives of Satyajit Ray’s posters reflect the sheer artistic level to which the master filmmaker lifted this facet of his movie-making exercise. In fact, this face of his consummate creativity can be fathomed from Satyajit Ray’s book illustrations for Signet Press or later, for other publishers. “The same creative strand ran through his film publicity material. For instance, in the run-up to Nayak’s [The Hero, 1966] release, father crafted the artwork for a huge hoarding which just showed two dark glasses. Passers-by spontaneously looked at it. Besides, one could and would interpret his posters in different ways. Many cine-goers, who watched his films, would call us to discuss about the posters,” Sandip informs.

When Sandip discovered that a clutch of the original prints were lost, he went across to Satyajit Ray’s producers to explore if he could locate some of them. “Fortunately, a fair number of producers had kept them in their offices, and helped by presenting these posters to us. However, we only have the original litho posters with us, in full size. The silk screens don’t remain with the producers too. What I mean is the original, full-scale silk screens,” says Sandip. Satyajit Ray would rarely come up with a variation in the artwork of a poster. This, he felt, would confuse viewers. Of course, an interesting example of a variation is Nayak. Two different artworks were made for this poster. Both the original litho prints are in the Ray family archive.

Satyajit Ray put to use various media to give shape to his artworks, according to Sandip. These were charcoal, mixed media, and poster colours. After all, one cannot forget that Ray was an accomplished artist by training who studied art in Rabindranath Tagore’s Kala Bhavan [in Shantiniketan’s Visva Bharati University] under the stewardship of the legendary Bengal artist Nandalal Bose. This, combined with his early working life at the British advertising firm DJ Keymer, where he rose to become art director, made him a complete artist, highly deft in the skills of fine and commercial art. Add to this his overwhelming genius and imagination, and what you have are film posters of an artistic height rarely seen before or after his time.

Ashoke Nag is a veteran writer on art and culture with a special interest in legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

All images from Satyajit Ray Society.

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